MG>>>>> Why do we never see these white antisemitic bigots
crying about the
 MG>>>>> elderly Jewish women blown to bits by
"suicide" bombers, or the

 BK>>>  Why do we never see these White Jewish bigots crying for the
 BK>>>  Palestinian children denied a future under nearly 40 years of
 BK>>>  Israeli rule?

 BK>>>  In case you forgot, it's the duty of an occupying power to
 BK>>>  provide for the occupied population.

 BA>> Yes it is.  And the situation of the so-called Palestinian
 BA>> people is the direct result of actions taken by the
 BA>> governments of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and, to a somewhat
 BA>> lesser extent, Jordan - none of which have adequately
 BA>> provided for those people to whom they offered "refuge."

 bk>  And if you are correct, then Israel does get blame for
 bk>  punishing the Palestinians for what those other states did.

 bk>  Notice, also, Israel occupied the Palestinian territories
 bk>  for over 30 years, and did not adequately provide for them
 bk>  either.

 Adding on to this. I have read a lot of this over the years, but
 here's a case where it's put together in one place.

 Note: There is guilt, and failure, on both sides.
 **************************************************************************

Economist.com 

*The Arabs and Israel*

**

*The hundred years' war*
Jan 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition

*How growing rejectionism, the rise of religion, a new military doctrine
and a new cold war keep peace at bay*

Reuters

Reuters

**

WITH luck, the destructive two-week battle between Israel and Hamas may
soon draw to an end. But how long before the century-long war between
Arabs and Jews in Palestine follows suit? It is hard to believe that
this will happen any time soon. Consider: Israel's current operation,
"Cast Lead", marks the fourth time Israel has fought its way into Gaza.
It almost captured Gaza (behind a pocket containing a young Egyptian
army officer called Gamal Abdul Nasser) in 1948, in the war Israelis
know as their war of independence. It captured Gaza again in 1956, as
part of a secret plan hatched with Britain and France to topple Nasser
as Egypt's president and restore British control of the Suez Canal. It
invaded a third time during the six-day war of 1967, and stayed
 there for 38 years, until withdrawing unilaterally three and a
 half years ago.


*Why they fight*

And Gaza, remember, is only one item in a mighty catalogue of misery,
whose entries are inscribed in tears. The Jews and Arabs of Palestine
have been fighting off and on for 100 years. In 1909 the mostly Russian
socialist idealists of the Zionist movement set up an armed group,
Hashomer, to protect their new farms and villages in Palestine from Arab
marauders. Since then has come the dismal march of wars, 1948, 1956,
1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and now 2009, each seared by blood and fire into
the conflicting myths and memories of the two sides. The intervals
between the wars have not been filled by peace but by bombs, raids,
uprisings and atrocities. Israeli settlers in Hebron today still cite,
as if it were yesterday, the massacre of Hebron's Jews in 1929. The
Arabs of Palestine still remember their desperate revolt in the 1930s
against the British mandate and Jewish immigration from Europe, and the
massacres of 1948.

The slaughter this week in Gaza, in which on one day alone some 40
civilians, many children, were killed in a single salvo of Israeli
shells, will pour fresh poison into the brimming well of hate (see
article). But a conflict that has
lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments.
Those who choose to reduce it to the "terrorism" of one side or the
"colonialism" of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At
heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It
is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a
line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because
it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a
people at all, at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the
Middle East.

That is one reason why this conflict grinds on remorselessly from decade
to decade. During eruptions of violence, the mantra of diplomats and
editorialists is the need for a two-state solution. It sounds so simple:
if two peoples cannot share the land, they must divide it. This seemed
obvious to some outsiders even before the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews
prompted the United Nations in 1947 to call for the creation of separate
Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. In 1937 a British royal commission
concluded that "an irrepressible conflict has arisen between two
national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country." The
answer had to be partition.

The fact that the Arabs rejected the UN's partition plan of 60 years ago
has long given ideological comfort to Israel and its supporters. Abba
Eban, an Israeli foreign minister, quipped that the Palestinians "never
missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity?. Israel's story is that
the Arabs have muffed at least four chances to have a Palestinian state.
They could have said yes to partition in 1947. They could have made
peace after the war of 1947-48. They had another chance after Israel
routed its neighbours in 1967 ("We are just waiting for a telephone
call," said Moshe Dayan, Israel's hero of that war). They had yet
another in 2000 when Ehud Barak, now Israel's defence minister and then
its prime minister, offered the Palestinians a state at Bill Clinton's
fateful summit at Camp David.

This story of Israeli acceptance and Arab rejection is not just a yarn
convenient to Israel's supporters. It is worth remembering that it was
not until 1988, a full 40 years after Israel's birth, that Yasser
Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) renounced its goal of
liberating the whole of Palestine from the river to the sea. All the
same, the truth is much more shaded than the Israeli account allows.
There have been missed opportunities, and long periods of rejection, on
Israel's part, too.

Look again at those missed opportunities. At the time of the UN
partition resolution, the Jews of Palestine numbered only 600,000 and
the Arabs more than twice that number. Most of the Jews were incomers.
Although partition might have been the wiser choice for the
Palestinians, it did not strike them as remotely fair. In the subsequent
war, more than 600,000 of Palestine's Arabs fled or were put to flight.
Afterwards, disinclined either to take them back or return the extra
land it had gained in battle, Israel was relieved that the Arab states,
traumatised by the rout, made no serious offer of peace. Many of the
refugees have been stuck ever since in a sad finger of dunes, the Gaza
Strip, pointing at the bright lights of Tel Aviv.


*When Israel fell in love*

After the ignominious defeat of 1967, the Arab states again rejected the
idea of peace with Israel. That was, indeed, a wasted opportunity. But
even though the Israel of 1967 discussed how much of the West Bank it
was ready to trade for peace, the Likud governments of the late 1970s
and 1980s wanted it all. For Israel fell in love with the territories it
had occupied.

This was the period of Israeli rejection. Israeli prime ministers such
as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir asserted a God-given right to a
"greater Israel" that included the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in which
Israeli governments of all stripes continued to plant (illegal)
settlements. In some Israeli minds the Palestinians became a non-people,
to be fobbed off with self-government under Israeli or perhaps Jordanian
supervision. It took an explosion of Palestinian resistance, in the
/intifada /(uprising) of the late 1980s and the far more lethal one of
2001-03, to convince Israel that this was an illusion.

Corbis

Corbis

*Building up the iron wall*


 What bearing does all this history have on the foul events
 unfolding right now in Gaza? The point is that there have been
 precious few moments over the past century during which both
 sides have embraced the idea of two states at the same time.
 The most promising moment of all came at the beginning of this
 decade, with Mr Clinton's near-miss at Camp David. But now, with
 the rise of Hamas and the war in Gaza, the brief period of
 relative hope is in danger of flickering out.

 If rejection of the other side's national claims is one of the
 things that make this conflict so hard to end, the other is
 religion. The two are tied together. Hamas is a religious
 movement, and its formal creed is to reject the possibility of
 Jewish statehood not only because of Israel's alleged sins but
 also because there is no place for a Jewish state in a Muslim
 land.

 In Israel's early life Zionism was a mainly secular movement
 and the dominant force on the other side was a secular Arab
 nationalism. Since 1967, however, religion, nationalism and
 hunger for Palestinians? land have fused to create a powerful
 constituency in Israel dedicated to retaining control of the
 whole of Jerusalem and Judaism's holy places on the West Bank.
 Israel's system of proportional voting has given the settlers
 and zealots a chokehold over politics. Among Arabs secular
 nationalism is meanwhile waning in the face of a powerful
 Islamic revival through the region. And a central dogma of the
 Islamists is that Israel is an implant that must be violently
 resisted and eventually destroyed.

 One far-seeing Zionist, Vladimir Jabotinsky, predicted in the
 1930s not only that the Arabs would oppose the swamping of
 Palestine with Jewish immigrants but also that "if we were
 Arabs, we would not accept it either?. In order to survive, the
 Jews would have to build an "iron wall" of military power until
 the Arabs accepted their state's permanence. And this came to
 pass. Only after several costly wars did Egypt and later the PLO
 conclude that, since Israel could not be vanquished, they had
 better cut a deal. In Beirut in 2002 all the Arab states
 followed suit, offering Israel normal relations in return for
 its withdrawal from all the occupied territories, an opening
 which Israel was foolish to neglect.

 The depressing thing about the rise of Hamas and the decline of
 the Fatah wing of the PLO is that it reverses this decades-long
 trend. Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections of 2006 had
 many causes, including a reputation for honesty. Its victory did
 not prove that Palestinians had been bewitched by Islamist
 militancy or come to believe again in liberating all of
 Palestine by force. But if you take seriously what Hamas says in
 its charter, Hamas itself does believe this. So does Hizbullah,
 Lebanon's "Party of God?; and so does a rising and soon perhaps
 nuclear-armed Iran. Some analysts take heart from Hamas's offer
 of a 30-year truce if Israel returns to its 1967 borders. But
 it has never offered permanent recognition.

 There is worse. On top of the return to rejection and the
 growing role of religion, a third new obstacle to peace is the
 apparent crumbling of Jabotinsky's iron wall.

 In Lebanon three years ago, and today in Gaza, Hizbullah and
 Hamas seem to have invented a new military doctrine. Israel has
 deterred its enemies mainly by relying on a mighty conventional
 army to react with much greater force to any provocation. But
 non-state actors are harder to deter. Hizbullah and Hamas, armed
 by Iran with some modern weapons, can burrow inside the towns
 and villages of their own people while lobbing rockets at
 Israel?s. A state that yearns for a semblance of normality
 between its wars cannot let such attacks become routine. That is
 why today, as in the 1950s, Israel responds to pinpricks with
 punitive raids, each of which had the potential to flare into
 war. Israel's operation in Gaza is designed not only to stop
 Hamas's rockets but to shore up a doctrine on which Israel
 thinks its safety must still be based.

 At Camp David in 2000 Israel and the Palestinians discovered
 that even with goodwill it is hard to agree terms. How to share
 Jerusalem? What to offer the refugees who will never go home?
 How can Israel trust that the land it vacates is not used, as
 Gaza has been, as a bridgehead for further struggle? But?and
 this is the fourth thing that keeps the battle alive?the two
 sides are seldom left alone to tackle these core issues.

 For too long the conflict in Palestine was a hostage to the
 cold war. America was once neutral: it was Eisenhower who forced
 Israel out of Gaza (and Britain out of Egypt) after Suez. But
 America later recruited Israel as an ally, and this suited the
 Israelis just fine. It gave them the support of a superpower
 whilst relieving them of a duty to resolve the quarrel with the
 Palestinians, even though their own long-term well-being must
 surely depend on solving that conflict.

 It may be no coincidence that some of the most promising
 peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians took place soon
 after the cold war ended. But now a new sort of geopolitical
 confrontation stalks the region, one that sets America against
 Iran, and the Islamist movements Iran supports against the Arab
 regimes in America's camp. With Hamas inside Iran's tent and
 Fatah in America?s, the Palestinians are now facing a paralysing
 schism.


 *And so to Gaza*

 Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, has been saying all
 week that, although Israel's immediate aim is to stop the rocket
 fire and not to topple Hamas, there can be no peace, and no free
 Palestine, while Hamas remains in control. She is right that
 with Hamas in power in Gaza the Islamists can continue to wreck
 any agreement Israel negotiates with Mahmoud Abbas, the
 president of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority on the
 West Bank. Mr Abbas, along with Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak,
 may quietly relish Hamas being taken down a peg. Egypt is
 furious at Hamas's recent refusal to renew talks with Fatah
 about restoring a Palestinian unity government.

 There is a limit, however. Taking Hamas down a peg is one
 thing. But even in the event of Israel "winning" in Gaza, a
 hundred years of war suggest that the Palestinians cannot be
 silenced by brute force. Hamas will survive, and with it that
 strain in Arab thinking which says that a Jewish state does not
 belong in the Middle East. To counter that view, Israel must
 show not only that it is too strong to be swept away but also
 that it is willing to give up the land?the West Bank, not just
 Gaza?where the promised Palestinian state must stand. Unless it
 starts doing that convincingly, at a minimum by freezing new
 settlement, it is Palestine's zealots who will flourish and its
 peacemakers who will fall back into silence. All of Israel's
 friends, including Barack Obama, should be telling it this.

 Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist
 Group. All rights reserved.


 **************************************************************************

BOB KLAHN bob.klahn{at}sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

 * Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5a